1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to health, fitness, and lifestyle management, and more specifically to a software and hardware system which enables effective lifestyle management by providing a dynamic assessment of a user's physical and behavioral metrics via a high feedback ratio interface.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the U.S., diet, exercise and personal health improvement markets exceed $60 billion annually; yet, two thirds of adults are overweight. Links between obesity and numerous serious and fatal health conditions are well documented. Lost worker productivity and increased health care costs in America due to obesity exceed $100 billion annually. Being obese is unhealthy, expensive and diminishes one's quality of life. These sobering realities, as well as social and personal pressures, however, are apparently not effective enough drivers for most people to achieve a healthy weight. Obesity rates in America and around the developed world continue to rise at an alarming pace. A schism exists between what people want, or even need, and what they achieve.
Although 95% of diets reportedly fail, the 5% who succeed at losing weight represent the entirety of the social, economic and physiological demographic spectrum. What, then, is the primary reason for this schism? The key differentiator between those who succeed and fail is motivation and behavior management. Motivation fuels behavior and results follow behavior. The schism, then, is a failure of behavior management.
A well-known key to weight control is a daily caloric balance—consume only as many calories in a day as are burned. That simple equation, however, and corresponding behavior is simply unattainable for many people. Why? Because the effort-to-reward mechanism is ineffective for too many people.
Motivation is unsustainable in an ineffective effort-to-reward mechanism. An effective effort-to-reward mechanism can sustain motivation and enable effective behavior management. Effective effort-to-reward mechanisms meet necessary thresholds and balance of the following four criteria:                1. Temporal—a reward must be timely enough to the effort to be an effective motivator. Optimally, the reward would occur during the effort or immediately following.        2. Association—an effort and reward must be tangibly related to one another to be an effective motivator. Optimally, the effort and reward are viscerally related, an innately understood link.        3. Assimilation—a reward must have meaning and value to the subject to be an effective motivator.        4. Ratio—a reward-to-effort ratio must meet a minimum threshold to be an effective motivator. The higher the ratio of reward to effort the more effective the motivation.        
It is important to note that ‘necessary thresholds’ vary from person to person. One size does not fit all. A system or method must be flexible to allow individual discovery of their own effective motivational threshold. In a fully realized healthy lifestyle, ‘exercise’ and ‘eating right’ become rewards themselves.
Existing methods or systems to heighten people's motivation and enable behavior management to achieve health, fitness and lifestyle goals include: weight-loss counseling, pre-prepared and portioned meals, peer-to-peer support groups, fitness groups and clubs, health challenges, hypnosis and many others. Many of these methods and systems have been in existence for years, even decades, yet obesity rates have nearly doubled in the past thirty years. For many people, current methods and systems fail to satisfy all four requirements of an effective effort-to-reward mechanism.
Most lifestyle goals cannot be achieved in a single action; they are a process, achieved over time. If the action and behavior itself is not a reward mechanism for the individual, then additional feedback and reward mechanisms are necessary.
Prior art methods or systems that attempt temporally effective reward mechanisms include data tracking websites or websites associated with personal biometric devices. The data feedback on such sites is often focused on a single metric, which is narrow and minimally informative.
Weight-loss support group sites have a marginally better feedback ratio for posted comments or messages; users can receive several replies for each message. The relationship between the feedback/reward and the user's overall goal in these cases, however, is marginalized. If the user's overall goal is to lose weight, for example, how direct of a reward to that effort is this feedback? The reward of support messages is more closely related to the behavior of message exchanging itself, and only tangentially related to losing weight. It is a step removed from the efforts and behaviors of actually losing weight.
A user needs a personal connection or meaning to the feedback/reward to be effective. Too often, user profiling is not sufficiently varied or personalized. Meaningful feedback, therefore, is limited and contributes to low effort-to-reward feedback ratios.
In existing systems, the desired goal is often a number, a fixed measurement, of what is considered healthy for someone with the user's attributes. This number, this goal measurement, is historically a very poor motivator. People have been told what they are supposed to weigh many times already. Familiarity with a number is not the same as a relationship or meaning.